Some people are addicted to booze, others to sex, and then there are those who have risked it all with their bookie on fantasy football or their March-madness pool.

I only wish I had one of those addictions.

I’m hooked on something not covered by health-plans, support groups, or big-buck, non-profit charities.

Hello. My name is Robb, and I’m a domain-name junkie.

I can’t tell you exactly how many domain names I own because I honestly don’t know. But I can tell you how I fell into the abyss. I’m a writer, with great ideas for stories and projects that have cool names that’s I’m eager to write, someday…. You see, it’s much more fun going on GoDaddy after downing a bottle of Zin and a brick of Bree and just typing in various fun book titles. I have ideas for time-traveling, ghost stories, spy-mysteries, and a raft of self-help titles ranging from personal relationships to how to use debate to stomp someone into a pancake-flat puddle of fear.

Some of the domains have normal names like speech.biz, or interpersonal.us. These make sense, but others I own are a collection of nonsensical letters, like a bad draw in Scrabble. I look to my daily journals to decipher them and answer the question: “What on Earth is that?” But I can’t read my own 4 am handwriting. So, I have no idea what I was thinking or what to do with these word-globs. And I have less chance of selling them back that I do unloading my holdings in bitcoin. The only domains that people want are those that I bought for my children, years ago.

Yes. I have a collection of family-themed URLs. This seemed like a good idea at the time — legacy-gifts to my kids. I mean, they have my name, so why not be the one-and-only kiddos@www.***lightfoot.com (name redacted by request) in the entire world! Apparently, this is a “dad idea,” something one step lower than a dad-joke. So, for now, these domains just sit there, unloved and unused. They’re a digital dead end. Stupid? Yeah. But I’m not a complete dolt. I get emails now and then from a bunch of other people named ***, and ***, and ***. They all want to buy my kids’ domains, but letting these puppies go would be like putting the kids up for virtual adoption. I simply can’t. Not when they’re behaving.

Now, I have released some of these middle-of-the-night-domain-duds back into the wild, including one saying that my Congressman, a January 6th election-denier weasel, should be flogged, tarred, feathered, and made to drink a case of expired Coors. The problem is that my anger and indignation only carried me to buy the domain, not to activate it and spend the long hours filling it with content. That’s much less fun that simply imagining the snide things I’d say and continuing to drink cheap wine.

Yeah. I’m good at writing things in my own head. The problem comes when I hit the keyboard and, well, stupid stuff oozes out of my fingers.

I have put some book-ideas up on websites, but they were, shall we say orders of magnitude less popular than the Martian or Julie and Julia. A few posts in, and I was toast. Not even my family visited these stinkers. Then my dead-blog sat there, decaying and festering, like a too-slow squirrel splattered on the tarmac. I’ve scraped these causalities off the digital highway, but thanks to the sadists over at the Internet Time Machine, they will exist in cyberspace for all time as a testimony to how much bigger my domain-name eyes are than my brain.

So why am I telling you this? A couple of reasons. First, I hope that throwing myself under the bus, with the inevitable shame that will come my way for being a hoarder, may finally break me of this vile, and a friend says way-too-nerdy, quirk. Unfortunately, I tend to doubt it. I’m already working on a domain name for domain-name addicts.

How does ImHoplesslyAddictedToGoDaddy.com sound? It’s available, and how can I resist? They’ll throw in .net and .org for just two more dollars….

The second reason is that I’m hoping for a shot at redemption. You see, there’s a chance a bigger sucker, or ah, savvy entrepreneur like you, may snap up my stockpile of delusions. According to GoDaddy’s value-estimating algorithm, these gems are worth umpteen gazillions of smackeroos. And why would they lie? So, that’s why I just keep renewing them. Much like professional gamblers in Las Vegas who pull their pet slot machine’s handle, time and again, day after day. They know it’s a hot machine and bound to pay off…someday soon. Yessiree.

Hope springs eternal.

Now, I’m smarter than they are, at least I’d like to think so. I don’t expect a jackpot. I just to squeeze out enough money out of my old domains to salvage a bit of my pride.

So, help me out here. Let’s haggle. I’d love to unload them all in a sort of pre-estate sale. In bulk. If not, then maybe you’d like intercultural.biz? Or, howtodebate.com? Because, after all, it’sdebatable.com.

Yeah, I own that one, too.

Hmmm…. Writing this down has made me think, and buy three more domain names.

Damn.

Time to seek some help. I guess I need a sponsor.

Hello, my name is Robb, I’m an internet domain name junkie, and I’m zero-days domain sober.

Originally published at https://www.robblightfoot.com on April 11, 2023.